Veterans of the News Business Are Now Fighting Fakes - The New York Times

The venture is not Mr. Brill’s first go-round on the media beat. In 1998, he founded the monthly magazine Brill’s Content, which chronicled how the journalism sausage got made until it closed in 2001.

He acknowledged that, for now, NewsGuard’s analysis lacked the distribution to have a major effect, but a Gallup survey funded by the Knight Foundation suggested that independent ratings can change how people consume news. Readers who participated in the poll were less likely to share headlines that were flagged as potentially misleading. (The Knight Foundation is also an investor in NewsGuard.)

NewsGuard has raised about $6 million at a valuation of around $20 million. Its biggest corporate backer is Publicis, an advertising holding company.

Both founders said they were surprised, at first, by the advertising industry’s interest in their project. “For them, it’s the whole problem of fake news being an issue for ‘brand safety,’” Mr. Brill said. “I hadn’t even heard that term until we looked out for investors.”

Last year, some advertisers fled YouTube after they noticed their messages were appearing alongside videos promoting terrorists. And while they haven’t abandoned Facebook, marketers are requesting more data to make sure their brands aren’t being associated with questionable content.

Facebook has become a flash point for the spread of false reports. To combat media pollution, the company has worked with fact checkers and has enlisted third-party groups, including The Associated Press, Snopes and PolitiFact, to make evaluations. Still, it can take up to three days for Facebook to verify content — which has little or no effect, in most cases, since articles go viral in minutes.

Facebook and other social networks have not signed on with NewsGuard, but Mr. Brill and Mr. Crovitz anticipate that some kind of ratings service will eventually be adopted across the web. And despite their positioning as a nutrition label for news, they said no one should interpret their work as an endorsement for some kind of media equivalent to the Food and Drug Administration.

“We’d be very uncomfortable if the government were mandating anything with regard to news,” Mr. Crovitz said. “That would violate free speech values. You have the First Amendment.”

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